5G Tutorial

Data creation keeps growing at a mind boggling rate: from the digitizing and storing of business records and transactions, the storage and sharing of photos, images and video, and more recently, the expansion of intelligent instrumentation and metering. Equally, data consumption keeps growing too, driven by smart phones, centralized enterprise services and cloud computing. The rate, type and volume of data being moved around constantly threatens to overwhelm IP networks and as a consequence, drives the need for even greater bandwidth. As such, the migration from 10Gb Ethernet to 40 and 100Gb Ethernet systems is quite simply unavoidable, with 400Gb and 1Tb to follow in the future.

Whether it’s transporting all that Big Data from one warehouse to another or from one server to another, or sending data over an ultra-long-haul optical fiber, transporting data packets at 40/100 Gb/s is not without its technical challenges. (As a benchmark, a single fibre cable operating at 100Gb/s can carry the equivalent of 1,500,000 phone calls simultaneously.) Applications and services demand high-speed connectivity, precise timing and low latency. Network devices must be stable and reliable. And assessing the integrity of data transfer, validating performance such as synchronization and mapping/de-mapping, and ensuring standards compliance requires test equipment of considerable precision.

How can Calnex help? Calnex offers two 40/100GbE solutions, the Paragon-100G SyncE tester and the Spirent Attero-100G Impairment tester aimed at verifying the performance of the 40/100Gb/s Ethernet devices that make up the core of the latest telecoms networks.

The Paragon-100G precisely measures frequency and phase synchronization to prove packet-transport devices meet ITU-T and IEEE standards. The Attero-100G delivers real-world impairments with nanosecond precision to prove and validate data center performance, Quality of Service mechanisms and delay-sensitive applications.